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I know too many people plagued by cancer. Young people, middle-aged people, the old, intimates, casual acquaintances, and strangers all are riddled with the disease. It is ubiquitous and it often feels like it’s something inevitable. A dark voice in me is convinced that if we live long enough we’ll all either suffer from some form of cancer, Alzheimer’s, or diabetes. There is no escaping. This is our contemporary existence; these are the plagues we’ve chosen.

Nearly everyone I know who’ve endured cancer have come out the other side. They are alive today, healthy but a disparate self. Articulating this change becomes a vital task, one that it’s incumbent upon me to listen to intently. I would argue that this is the purpose of survivor literature, those of us that didn’t undergo the experience have a duty to read, watch, and…

Between Two Fires is the first novel in the planned trilogy Dread Desires from Toni Williams. This debut is a murder mystery set in the Caribbean on the fictional Elysian Island off the coast of St. Lucia as well as in the city of Soufriere on Saint Lucia. While presented at first as the story of a man getting entangled and overwhelmed by a smart, independent-minded woman, the story quickly takes a turn into more familiar thriller territory. In fact, Williams creates a sort of Caribbean crime noir novel which manages to not just fit the genre well but open up a lot of interesting possibilities with the storytelling.

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I’m not sure who “AWP Is Us” is addressed to.* It can’t be me Kate Gale of Red Hen Press is pointing at. I went to Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference once in 2014, when it was in Seattle and I could carpool and stay at a friend’s house rather than paying for transportation and hotel. I was in a master’s program so I qualified for the very reasonable student rate ($50).

AWP 2016 is at the end of March in Los Angeles. If I were to book right now, airfare from here to LA would be a little over $200 (not bad, but would get more expensive the longer I waffled). Early bird nonmember registration is $240 and tops out at $300 closer to the event. Maybe I could figure out a friend I could stay with in LA, but I’d probably be best off…

Love, the great destroyer, the apart-tearer — woe unto those caught in the crosshairs of the love of Brandi Wells’ unnamed narrator in her novella This Boring Apocalypse, be they woman, man, or torso, cat or cow, horse, house, or tree. Everything in This Boring Apocalypse is taken apart, catalogued and itemized and, if none of it ever quite dies, it is perhaps only because we have misunderstood what it means to be alive.

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Dear friends who love poetry: we started our spring fundraiser a little soon after AWP and Buffalo Small Press Book Fair and a handful of other events we could not get to this time around, where people buy great micro-press books, and I fear that means strapped budgets: our spring fund drive is pretty slow-going this year. We’ve got less than a week to go, and we haven’t quite hit our halfway mark. Can you help? And get some awesome books for yourself in the process? It’s your first chance to order any of our 2015 chapbooks; it’s also your first chance to pre-order two forthcoming full-length titles: Anne Cecelia Holmes’ THE JITTERS and Kristi Maxwell’s PLAN/K. Feel free to forward EVERYWHERE!